There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
In 2008, a few years after the birth of "décroissance" in France, we organized the first International Degrowth Conference for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity in Paris. Only ten years later, in 2018, we promoted three large international events in the same year: the 6th International Degrowth Conference in Malmö - following Barcelona, Venice, Leipzig and Budapest – as well as a macr...
Gemüsekooperative Rote Beete [Vegetable Cooperative „Rote Beete“] from Marc Menningmann on Vimeo. What has agriculture to do with the climate? A lot. Modern, industrialized agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. This video shows an excursion which took place in the context of the Degrowth Conference in Leipzig last year. Participants visited the vegetable cooperative "Rote Beete" o...
By Jamey Ellis Each of us has given without the expectation of receiving. Each of us knows the rewards of doing so. Sometimes the joy felt by those giving can even seem to outweigh that of the ones receiving. We’ve all taken part in a gift exchange, be it birthdays, holidays or anniversaries. But do we actually need to wait until a specific moment to find that joy of giving? Could such giving...
